Using SmartOS as a Hypervisor

SmartOS is an open source distribution of illumos, currently in production for Joyent's public cloud, where it provides a hypervisor that is secure, flexible and observable. It leverages technologies such as ZFS snapshots and clones for rapid provisioning, KVM and Zones for hardware and OS virtualization, and DTrace to safely understand what's going on inside of guests and the hypervisor. This talk will describe these technologies and their use, including engineering challenges encountered, and discuss opportunities for observing guests such as Linux and Windows.